‘Christianists’ for peace

An example of how misleading and unhelpful Andrew Sullivan’s “Christianist” designation is: Andrew’s denouncing as a “Christianist” the Bruderhof pastor Johann Christoph Arnold, because Arnold is opposed to gay marriage and says, “God’s law is supreme.”

For one thing, surely Andrew knows that the refusal to follow, on grounds of religious conscience, laws that one finds unjust is the basis for civil disobedience. Thomas More died because he considered himself “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also martyred because he insisted on serving God instead of Adolf Hitler. Martin Luther King went to jail multiple times because of his belief that “God’s law is supreme.” Today in Iran, a Christian pastor who converted from Islam is preparing to face execution because he will not recant his faith.

I hope that I have the courage to refuse to follow an unjust law that I profoundly believed contradicted the law of God, no matter what the consequences for me. Andrew professes Christ also; he would be a sorry Christian if he weren’t prepared to do the same.

For another thing, does Andrew realize who Johann Christoph Arnold is? He is a pacifist whose grandfather led the Bruderhof community driven out of Nazi Germany by persecution. His writings are usually about peace-making and forgiveness. He is by no means part of the Religious Right. But because he holds to the Bible’s clear teaching about marriage, Andrew vilifies him as a “Christianist.” If Johann Christoph Arnold earns that designation, then it belongs to everybody who professes Christianity but who disagrees (as most Christians in every time and place, until the last 20 years, have done) with Andrew’s position on marriage equality. In which case, how useful is it as a descriptive term?

It’s not. It’s only a term of abuse for Christians Andrew dislikes. I wish he would withdraw it. To apply it to a man like Johann Christian Arnold, who comes out of the most un-Constantinian Christian tradition there is, of being a “Christianist” is to reveal how bankrupt the concept is.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 61 comments

61 Responses to ‘Christianists’ for peace

“When animals mate, they are following Darwinian responses. Homosexuality exists in the animal kingdom only as a darwinian strategy in special circumstances and within the overall scheme of reproduction.”

This is simply false. Sex serves a variety of purposes besides reproduction. Just looking at primates, baboons use sex to establish dominance. Bonobos use sex as social lubricant. A primatologist likely would give another half-dozen examples.

And while sex evolved because of reproduction, don’t make the mistake of thinking that is an animal’s purpose, even when that is the result. Most animals don’t have the cognitive ability to anticipate that! Even in those that perhaps do, there is no reason to think that is what drives sex. If we were to anthropomorphize what goes through the mind of a chimpanzee in estrus, I suspect it is much closer to “me so horny,” than “I’d like another baby.” There is no one plotting a Darwinian strategy, not even the animals whose behavior reflects it.

Also, Jacobs’s article at TAS makes a similar mistake. Of course MLK was personally inspired and fueled by his own Christian faith. But the truth and the rights that he fought for deserved to prevail not because they are grounded in Christianity, or in any other religious faith, but because they are universal human rights, not conceptually tied to any particular religious faith or to religious faith at all. And to see those convictions pass into law in American society in particular requires that they not be essentially grounded in religious tenets held on faith by adherents of a particular religion.

The Christianist fight against homosexuality in general, and gay marriage in particular, may in the future be recognized as the last battle of the Enlightenment; the final extension and incorporation of the principles born of that socio-politico-philosophical movement into actual governance.

Andrew may be careless in his use of the Christianist label from time to time; he’s human and prolific. But he is generally consistent, and applies it to those Christians seeking to impose their religious beliefs on society through governmental action to oppress, deny equal treatment to, or otherwise limit the rights of others.

Neither marriage or monogamy are natural, but rather a product of civilization. As such, the definition of marriage (not just the man/woman definition, but the larger and more complex definition of the entire institution) is the providence of the society that hosts it, and it has changed constantly throughout human history.

Currently in the United States, the culture is shifting to more broad based moral acceptence of homosexuality as whole, and in turn we are pollitically and legislativly shifting the definition of marriage to accomidate these changes to our collective morallity.

And if you think that morallity is immutable, history is full of people who thought this and whose moral structure would be completly alien in the modern world. The common example is contemporarly moral people who owned slaves – which would be considered completly immoral today.

It is unfortunate when people who should know better intentionally misstate the findings of the natural sciences on the role which homosexuality plays in the preservation of species.
If we are to believe the traditional defense of ultra-conservative Catholics that Galileo was punished, not for his heliocentric views but his improper reasoning, then it only compounds the intentional false witness to make such statements.
Christianist is a neologism. As such, the definition, however settled among lexicographers is going to remain fluid for some time. It is no surprise that Dreher dislikes the term, the conflict between his own profound dislike of homosexuality and his striving to be a good Christian is at the root of much of the conflict he has with the term.

There is, of course, an easy answer to all those who insist that granting us homosexuals the right to marry is immoral. We can examine those countries which grant us marriage or partnership rights and in which we enjoy full civil rights. Our examination should index the most grievous of moral failings in those countries against the status quo in the US, where our civil rights are denied us.
Where are the rates of newborn and early childhood death highest?
Where are the divorce rates among heterosexuals highest?
Where are the abortion rates highest?
Where are the rape and murder rates highest?
Where are those practices condemned by the Catholic Church most practiced, ie: Wars of aggression, lack of health insurance, imposition of the death penalty, support for torture.

A truly fair assessment shows that my full civil rights and marriage in Europe has not caused any decline in morals. It could, in fact, be argued that those developed countries which most restrict gay rights are also those most culpable of moral failings.

I am curious how one goes about “breaking the law” when it comes to gay marriage. Does this mean one would, for example, not rent an apartment to a gay couple if they were married. but would if they weren’t? And how is one “civilly disobedient to gay marriage “laws”?

If you accept that marriage is a basic human right, then the only way you can say that homosexuals are not being denied a basic human right is to say that they are not human. Some on this blog seem to being making that inference by comparing them to garden creatures, but I don’t think you are one of them.

We deny people basic human rights all the time. Those who commit crimes are denied some of their rights. Children are denied many rights. As far as marriage goes, we deny the right of closely related people to get married. I know a woman who lived with her uncle from her late teens in an incestuous relationship until the day he died, and she certainly felt it was unfair that she was denied her right to marry.

So the question isn’t whether gays are being denied the right to marry. As I said, if you accept the first claim, the second can’t help but follow. The question is whether there is a good reason to deny gays the right to marry one another, as we do close relatives. That’s the major issue that was on trial in California recently over Prop 8. The anti-marriage case was embarrassingly empty of sound reasons to deny gays this basic right. It’s not as if the courts felt the same way about incestuous marriages. And likewise, you have not come up with a sound reason to deny them this right either, except to claim that there is no specific right for gays to marry, but somehow there is for straights, which frankly makes no sense. Gays and straights are both human beings, and they have equal rights, and you can’t just deny one type of person their right to marry whomever they wish without very good legal and social reasons for it.

The problem with your formulation that men are free to marry a woman, but not a man, is that this is clear sexual discrimination. A woman is allowed to marry me, but not a man? What other legal contract makes this discriminatory exclusion? Are there any legal contracts that I can only make with a woman, and not a man? Would constitutional law permit such contractual restrictions to be enforced? Why should marriage contracts be exempt from this?

And of course we all know that since gay men are not interested in marrying women, to allow that, but not same-sex marriage, of course denies them the right to choose whom they would marry, just as anti-miscegenation laws have been struck down as unconstitutional because they deny whites to marry blacks, even though it applies universally on both sides of the fence. The principle is that the state must take a blind eye to who can marry whom, unless there is a strong social reason otherwise, as there is in the case of incest.

What you have to understand is that the courts are not “finding a new right” for homosexuals to get married. In virtually all cases, they are simply not finding any basis for the state to deny gays the right to marry that everyone else has. It’s true that this right has been denied them for many centuries, but it’s not true that no one ever wanted this right until recently. Gay couples in lifelong “marriage” to one another have always existed, in the closet or just in the breach. When I was growing up in the 1960s, living in the suburbs on a private road, the people living at the end of the road, off into the forest in a private setting, were a homosexual couple. Everyone in the neighborhood knew who they were and what they were about, but they kept to themselves so as I’m sure to avoid any confrontations about their relationship. They were as married as any other couple on the block, except for the paperwork. And they probably never thought it would be possible to be legally married, but I’m sure they would have been very happy to have the chance. And I’m sure in every generation there have been couples just like them living on the fringes of society, wary of their acceptability and suffering not just social stigma, but legal stigmas. So let’s not pretend this is actually a new issue for the people it actually affects. It may be a new issue for straights, but not for gays.

Long-suffering and even unacknowledged denials of human rights have been part of human history for a very long time. Most such rights have only recently been acknowledged, and only partially backed up by law. Not every denial of human rights is unwarranted, of course. But unless a pressing reason for such denials can be made, they should not be honored by the law any longer. Do you honestly disagree?

I have no problem on a social level with the existence of “norms”, so long as we don’t pretend that everything outside the norm is harmful, and should be legally excluded from society. You say you are not interested in persecuting gays, and I believe you. I believe you even believe that denying gays the right to marry is not a form of persecution. I think you simply need to look more closely at the facts of the matter, and see that it most certainly is.

Marriage has always been viewed as a basic human right. It has also always been restricted in various ways, both legally and socially, based on class, economics, religion, ethnicity, race, and obviously sexual orientation. There has never been a “definition of marriage”, and there isn’t one now either. It has always followed the various cultural and economic mores of the time. And over time in modern cultures, the various restrictions and customs that have limited who one can marry have been struck down, one by one. Why? Because the reasons for enforcing those restrictions have not withstood the test of our cultural and legal reasoning and accepted practices. Same sex marriage is simply another restriction upon a basic human right that no longer stands up to the light of reason, especially in the context of our modern culture, society, and constitutional law.

To say that there has never been a basic right to marriage for gays is to suggest that such rights don’t actually exist until they are granted by society. But that ignores the fundamental reason they are called “rights” in the first place. The legal basis for the concept of “rights” is that they have always existed, but simply not been properly acknowledged.

The foundation for our enshrinement of human rights in the constitution is the notion that man has inherent rights, given by God, and that the most just form of government is one that acknowledges and protects those inherent rights, regardless of what the majority wishes. The whole idea is to protect the rights of minorities against the majority, so that a great burden is placed on any legal regime that would deny people their rights. That burden is simply not met in the case of denying gay people their right to marry.

Now, I understand that your concept of God only gives the right to marry to straights, and not to gays, but to enshrine that notion of God in our laws would be the state making laws on the basis of religion, and that is simply forbidden. Actual evidentiary reasons have to be put forward that stand the test of strict scrutiny in order to justify denying marriage rights to gays. And that simply hasn’t been put forward by you or anyone else that I’m aware of. It always boils down to some kind of personal sense of moral outrage, disgust, or religious conviction, none of which is something that our laws can be based upon. So, do you really have anything more than that to argue?